Author: Moody, Elizabeth
Biography:
MOODY, Elizabeth, formerly GREENLY (1737-1814: ancestry.co.uk)
She was baptised 24 Apr. 1737 at Kingston upon Thames, the daughter of Edward Greenly and Mary Shepherd. In her Preface to Poetic Trifles (1798) she states that she had been educated in poetry by Edward Lovibond (1724-1775, q.v.), who lived less than four miles away at Hampton. He had addressed several poems to her and called her “a very accomplished Lady in that neighbourhood.” She may have edited his Poems (1785). She married the Dissenting minister Christopher Lake Moody (1754-1815), Vicar of Surbiton Farm (later of Turnham Green), on 23 Dec. 1777 at Thames Ditton. She was older and from a wealthy family so there was probably a marriage settlement but they had shared intellectual interests, with both of them contributing to Ralph Griffiths’ Monthly Review between 1789 and 1808. She also contributed an anti-war poem, "Anna’s Complaint; Or, The Miseries of War. Written in the Isle of Thanet, 1794" to George Miller’s War a System of Madness and Irreligion (1796), which, along with other miscellaneous verse in journals, she reprinted in Poetic Trifles (1798). She died at Turnham Green Terrace, aged 77, on 10 Dec. 1814 and was buried at St. Nicholas, Chiswick. Her husband died 20 Dec. 1815 and was also buried there. (ancestry.co.uk 6 Aug. 2020; Saint James’s Chronicle 10 and 13 Dec. 1814; GM Dec. 1814, 613 and Supp. 1815, 643; Northampton Mercury 23 Dec. 1815) AA